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The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2013...

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"You can jump into the entire collection here, or view a set of highlights here. The latter happens to include a curious image. (See below.) It’s from an 1894 book called The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, industries, manufactures, commerce, and its work in literature, science, education and self-government. And the picture features, according to the text, a “Typical figure, showing tendency of student life–stooping head, flat chest, and emaciated limbs.” It’s hard to know what to say about that." - maitani - -

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"We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of." - maitani - -

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The Homer Multitext: Images of the Geneva Iliad have been Posted! - http://homermultitext.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Images of the Geneva Iliad, which has undergone extensive restoration and digitization in a partnership between the E-Codices project of Switzerland and the Homer Multitext, have now been published. Here is an excerpt from the E-Codices press release:" - maitani - -

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"The “Geneva Iliad” was most likely produced in Constantinople in the 13th century. The manuscript was purchased in the 16th century, probably in Venice, by Henri Estienne, who used this manuscript as a basis for his 1566 edition of the Iliad, which remained the standard edition into the 18th century. This manuscript is unique for numerous scholia, which are not found in any other similar manuscript. The digital publication of this manuscript was requested in 2010 by the “Homer Multitext”, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University, which uses digital techniques to facilitate research regarding the multiformity of the textual tradition in Homeric epics." - maitani - -

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MINDFUL PLEASURES: The Golden Rule of Storytelling (as exemplified by Breaking Bad) - http://mindfulpleasures.blogspot.de/2013...

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Bunageridonucem - maitani - -

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"Here is the only necessary law of successful narrative fiction, the Golden Rule of Storytelling: The only law is the law of unintended consequences. This is how good stories proceed: from the unexpected through the unforeseen to the utterly unpredictable. Good narratives move through a series of major actions and the ramifying unintended consequences of those actions. It's the unexpectedness of the consequences that sustains a reader's interest, keeps readers reading and wondering what the hell will happen next. A story in which actions have only their expected consequences is a dull, unimaginative thing." - maitani - -

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Literary Review - Frances Spalding on the letters of Paul Cezanne - http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/spaldin...

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"Cézanne is a complex figure of towering importance in the history of art. As a person, he has, until now, been difficult to comprehend - as Lawrence Gowing once said, his writings deserve the close scrutiny and analysis normally reserved for classic texts. Those who have turned to the first English translation of his letters (published in 1941, revised and enlarged in 1976 and printed in paperback in 1995) may recollect the disappointment aroused by the stiff and awkward phrasing and the sense, in places, that the words remain dead on the page. But if its editor, John Rewald, a foundational scholar on Cézanne and the Impressionists, was in places ill-served by his translator, he nevertheless deserves praise for the herculean labour involved in finding Cézanne's letters, for the artist neither kept copies of the letters he wrote nor preserved the letters he received, other than those from Zola. In 1976 there were 231 letters by Cézanne in the public domain. Alex Danchev has raised this number to 252. He has also edited and retranslated these letters, ridding them of faults made in earlier transcriptions and translations. It is still a frustratingly small collection, but a more vivid and authentic voice now comes through." - maitani - -

"This might be a book of Paul Cézanne's letters, but the various self-portraits and photographs of the painter dropped into the text are no less revealing than his writings. Take, for instance, the photograph of him setting out to paint in the landscape near Auvers, around 1874. He stands mid-stride, resting on his stick, with painting box and folded easel on his back. Those gimlet eyes, beneath his straw hat, and the thick beard that obscures the lower part of his face immediately convey character and purpose. This is no Sunday painter but a man ferociously committed to the task in hand. 'Pictor semper virens', he added after his name in a letter to Marius Roux, the author of The Substance and the Shadow, a novel in which a character based on Cézanne ends his days a ruined man. The professional signature acted as a riposte: unlike his fictional alter ego he, the pictor ('painter'), was semper virens ('evergreen') - in other words, vigorously alive." - maitani - -

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3quarksdaily: How Antidepression Drugs Work - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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"In fact, SSRIs fail to work for mild cases of depression, suggesting that regulating serotonin might be an indirect treatment only. “There’s really no evidence that depression is a serotonin-deficiency syndrome,” says Alan Gelenberg, a depression and psychiatric researcher at The Pennsylvania State University. “It’s like saying that a headache is an aspirin-deficiency syndrome.” SSRIs work insofar as they reduce the symptoms of depression, but “they’re pretty nonspecific,” he adds. Now, research headed up by neuroscientists David Gurwitz and Noam Shomron of Tel Aviv University in Israel supports recent thinking that rather than a shortage of serotonin, a lack of synaptogenesis (the growth of new synapses, or nerve contacts) and neurogenesis (the generation and migration of new neurons) could cause depression. In this model lower serotonin levels would merely result when cells stopped making new connections among neurons or the brain stopped making new neurons. So, directly treating the cause of this diminished neuronal activity could prove to be a more effective therapy for depression than simply relying on drugs to increase serotonin levels." - maitani - -

"Depression strikes some 35 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, contributing to lowered quality of life as well as an increased risk of heart disease and suicide. Treatments typically include psychotherapy, support groups and education as well as psychiatric medications. SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, currently are the most commonly prescribed category of antidepressant drugs in the U.S., and have become a household name in treating depression. The action of these compounds is fairly familiar. SSRIs increase available levels of serotonin, sometimes referred to as the feel-good neurotransmitter, in our brains. Neurons communicate via neurotransmitters, chemicals which pass from one nerve cell to another. A transporter molecule recycles unused transmitter and carries it back to the pre-synaptic cell. For serotonin, that shuttle is called SERT (short for “serotonin transporter”). An SSRI binds to SERT and blocks its activity, allowing more serotonin to remain in the spaces between neurons. Yet, exactly how this biochemistry then works against depression remains a scientific mystery." - maitani - -

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BBC Nature - Europe's rarest orchid rediscovered in the Azores - http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature...

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"The new species, known as Hochstetter's butterfly-orchid, was first found in 1838 but had escaped official recognition for almost two centuries. Researchers analysed the islands' orchid populations and found the archipelago had three species of butterfly-orchid. The findings are published in the open-access journal PeerJ. Orchids are one of the most diverse and widespread families of flowering plants, with Europe home to more than 300 species. And according to the research team, the Azores are an ideal place to study the evolution of orchid species as the archipelago is located 1600km (990 miles) from the nearest landmass of Portugal. "Like many evolutionary biologists before me, I decided that an island system would be much simpler and would therefore yield less ambiguous results," explained lead researcher Professor Richard Bateman from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew." - maitani - -

"Europe's rarest species of orchid has been rediscovered on a single volcanic ridge in the Azores, claim scientists." - maitani - -

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How sleep makes your mind more creative « Mind Hacks - http://mindhacks.com/2013...

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"The best evidence we have of our mental state when we’re asleep is that strange phenomenon called dreaming. Much remains unknown about dreams, but one thing that is certain is that they are weird. Also listening to other people’s dreams can be deadly boring. They go on and on about how they were on a train, but it wasn’t a train, it was a dinner party, and their brother was there, as well as a girl they haven’t spoken to since they were nine, and… yawn. To the dreamer this all seems very important and somehow connected. To the rest of us it sounds like nonsense, and tedious nonsense at that." - maitani - -

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"It’s a tried and tested technique used by writers and poets, but can psychology explain why first moments after waking can be among our most imaginative?" - maitani - -

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Mani Matter - Ein Fernsehporträt von Franz Hohler (1973) http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Trapped in Vienna by Andrew Butterfield | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/blogs...

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"Vienna was not only a birthplace of modernism; it was also a “laboratory of world destruction,” to quote the legendary Viennese journalist Karl Kraus. The show at the National Gallery helps the viewer to see in the clearest terms the suffocating anxiety and oppressive solitude of the artists, writers, and patrons who were responsible for much of Viennese modernism. The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch famously called Vienna the city of “joyful apocalypse.” In this show, you can almost watch the apocalypse unfold. The first room of the exhibition is dedicated to recreating a show on Viennese portraiture of the early nineteenth century that was held at the Galerie Miethke in 1905. Neither the catalog nor the wall texts clearly explain why the exhibition begins in this manner, an omission that has caused considerable misunderstanding and criticism in the British art press. The Galerie Miethke was perhaps the most progressive gallery in Vienna at the time, yet the 1905 show was intended to demonstrate the technical command and expressive power of Austrian painting in the Biedermeier period, nearly one hundred years before." - maitani - -

"Vienna around 1900 has attracted immense attention since Carl Schorske’s great book on the cultural life of the city was published in 1981, and the subject now draws a wider audience than ever before, owing in part to the efforts of the Neue Galerie in New York and the recent avalanche of books and exhibitions. One sign of its prestige is the eight- and nine-figure sums paid for paintings by Klimt, among the highest ever for a work of art. Yet while many of these shows and publications recognize the tension and struggle in Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century, there has been a tendency to glorify the outpouring of artistic and intellectual creativity and to romanticize or minimize the psychic pain and the corrosive social setting that spurred it." - maitani - -

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The 2011 Japan Tsunami Was Caused By Largest Fault Slip Ever Recorded - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news...

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"Two years ago, the sea off the coast of Japan reared up and swept away tens of thousands of lives in a devastating natural disaster. The 2011 earthquake has been the subject of intense study ever since, and the trench that produced it is the best studied in the world. (See "Japan Tsunami: 20 Unforgettable Pictures.") Now, three papers published today in the journal Science reveal the magnitude 9 earthquake off the east coast of Japan still has the capacity to surprise. Experts calculate the fault—or the boundary between two tectonic plates—in the Japan trench slipped by as much as 164 feet (50 meters). Other similarly large magnitude earthquakes, including the 9.1 Sumatra event in 2004, resulted in a 66-to-82 foot (20-to-25 meter) slip in the fault. "We've never seen 50-meter [slips]," said Kelin Wang, a geophysicist with the Geological Survey of Canada in British Columbia." - maitani - -

"The next largest slip would probably be the Chile earthquake in 1960, said Wang, who was not involved in the research. Based on the limited data recorded from that earthquake, the fault slipped by 98 to 131 feet (30 to 40 meters). Most of the movement occurred horizontally, he explained. But because the plates are wedged together at this trench, that horizontal displacement still managed to thrust up enough seawater to produce the killer tsunami that hit Japan." - maitani - -

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'Pearl Earring' Is The Crown Jewel Of The Frick's Dutch Exhibit : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2013...

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"Some years ago, I wrote called "Why I Love Vermeer," which ends "I've never lived in a city without a Vermeer." I could say that until 1990, when Vermeer's exquisite painting The Concert was one of the masterpieces stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's still missing. The French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who loved that Vermeer, put together a show called Last Seen, a series of photographs of the empty frames of the stolen paintings, combined with comments on the paintings by people who worked at the museum. It's a haunting and elegant show, though seeing this exhibit, which is now on view at the Gardner, then walking through the rooms with the empty frames still in place, made me feel more melancholy and hopeless than ever about this enormous loss." - maitani - -

"One consolation for me is to see all the other Vermeers I can. No city in the world has more of them — eight — than New York. But right now there's even one more. Through January 19, at the Frick Collection — my favorite museum in New York, partly because of its own three Vermeers — there's , the great Dutch museum in The Hague. The centerpiece of the show is one of the world's most beloved paintings: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Cleaned and restored since I first saw it, it's even more breathtaking than I remembered." - maitani - -

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BPS Research Digest: The science of how we talk to ourselves in our heads - http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.de/2013...

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"For many years Russell Hurlbert and his colleagues have used a technique that they believe offers the best way to study what they call "pristine" inner speaking, unaltered by outside interference. They provide participants with a beeper that goes off randomly several times a day, and ask them to record in precise terms their mental activity that was happening just before the beeps. Early in the process, this "descriptive experience sampling" (DES) approach also involves cooperative interviews between the participants and a trained researcher, so that the participant can learn to identify true instances of inner speaking from other mental phenomena." - maitani - -

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"Now Hurlbert's team has documented some of what they've learned so far about the ways that we talk to ourselves in our own minds. Our inner voices usually sound to us like our external spoken voice - instances of inner speaking occurring in another person's voice are very rare. Just like our spoken voice, the voice of inner speaking can also express degrees of volume and emotion." - maitani - -

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How the Greeks Got There by Christopher Carroll | NYRgallery | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/blogs...

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"“Measuring and Mapping Space,” at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World through January, aims to explain how Greeks and Romans thought of the world around them, and how these beliefs were in turn represented in maps, globes, and even coins and pottery. Unfortunately, though a number of ancient geographical treatises still exist today, almost no actual maps have survived. But the show’s curator, Roberta Casagrande-Kim, has dealt with this brilliantly. By displaying, among much else, a striking collection of illustrated Renaissance manuscripts on geography and cosmology—themselves reconstructions of the work of classical geographers like Ptolemy—the exhibition manages at once to suggest not just what ancient maps may have looked like, but how ancient geography influenced modern notions of topography and geography." - maitani - -

"Around 450 BC, Hanno, the King of Carthage, led a fleet of sixty ships on a colonizing expedition down the west coast of Africa. Along the way he kept a log, recording the locations of the colonies he founded and the sights he saw: a race of men called the Troglodytae, said to run faster than horses; “a country burning with fire and perfume;” a towering volcano called the Chariot of the Gods. This type of log was called a periplus, an ancient wayfinding document that listed the ports of call and natural landmarks navigators could expect to find when sailing from one location to another. According to the exhibit “Measuring and Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” these texts, which often incorporated literary description and even myth (many, for instance, have debated the veracity of Hanno’s periplus), were among the preferred means of navigating for ancient mariners." - maitani - -

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The Paris Review interviews Ursula K. Le Guin | Book View Cafe Blog - http://bookviewcafe.com/blog...

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"“No single work did more to upend the genre’s conventions than The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)…." - maitani - -

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221 <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.theparisreview... ; title="http://www.theparisreview... ; - maitani - -

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A Calendar Page for December 2013 - Medieval manuscripts blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"The necessary work of preparing for winter continues on this full-page miniature for December. In the foreground, a man and a woman are slaughtering one of the pigs that was fattened in November, and catching its blood in a pan. Behind them, people are busy baking bread in a large oven, watched over by attentive birds. In the background, we can see a stag, hunted by horses and hounds, leaping over a gate. In the bas-de-page below, several men are playing at what appears to be a most entertaining (if dangerous) game: tug-of-war on sledges. On the following page can be found a roundel containing a goat for the zodiac sign Capricorn, alongside the saints' days for December. Interestingly, the feast day of Thomas Becket has remained unaltered, probably because this manuscript was not in England during the Reformation (for more on this question, see our post Erasing Becket). At the bottom of the folio, two men are sledging on a frozen pond, while others, including a man carrying a white hare, are gathered around a warming fire." - maitani - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology Textbook Online - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2013...

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"This site contains information about the prehistoric archaeology of the Aegean. Through a series of lessons and illustrations, it traces the cultural evolution of humanity in the Aegean basin from the era of hunting and gathering (Palaeolithic-Mesolithic) through the early village farming stage (Neolithic) and the formative period of Aegean civilization into the age of the great palatial cultures of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece." - maitani - -

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Muilend inna Maldacht - The Old-Irish Curse Engine - http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/sengoid...

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"Directions: Select one item from each of the boxes below and click on the “Maldacht” button to generate your curse in Old-Irish. (Or else generate a random curse.)" - maitani - -

Comrac fort fri echtrann arsaid inchrechfas do ball ferda! - maitani - -

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Ancient Afghanistan | New at LacusCurtius & Livius - http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/2013...

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"The central theme that connects the disciplines studying Antiquity is a devastating shortage of information. The history of the study of ancient civilizations can therefore be read as a series of attempts to overcome this problem. First, the study of coins and inscriptions was added to the study of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew sources. Then, ethnographic parallels were added, and after that, we saw the rise of art history and archaeology. The comparative explanatory models that were introduced in the twentieth century are now being improved by computer simulations. The data shortage forces the ancient historian to be a classicist, archaeologist, numismatist, epigrapher, anthropologist, and art historian as well." - maitani - -

"When we think of ancient Greek civilization, we rarely think of Afghanistan and the Punjab. We’re not alone. Most historians ignore these countries too. One of the few exceptions is the American historian Frank Holt, who has been studying ancient Bactria and Gandara for many years. Lost World of the Golden King is his latest and most interesting book, but unlike his earlier publications, he is not focusing on Antiquity but on the study of Antiquity. In this way, he shows the study of the past at its best." - maitani - -

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Echoes of The Iliad through history | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2013...

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"The Iliad was largely believed to belong to myth and legend until Heinrich Schliemann set out to prove the true history behind Homer’s epic poem and find the remnants of the Trojan War. The businessman turned archaeologist excavated a number of sites in Greece and Turkey, and caused an international sensation. While many of his claims and finds have since been discredited or discovered to be contaminated, he set many on the search to reveal life in Ancient Greece. A number of images that convey the real objects and places where scholars have drawn connections to the Trojan War (both historical and fictional) are included Barry B. Powell’s new translation of The Iliad and the slideshow below." - maitani - -

the slideshow is interesting - maitani - -

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Rationally Speaking: The Dark Side of the Enlightenment - http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2013...

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"People who identify with the various versions of the skeptic / atheist / rationalist / freethinking movement(s) hold up the Enlightenment, the famous “Age of Reason,” to be the pinnacle of human civilization, as well as a model for future progress. Richard Dawkins famously said that he considers himself a son of the Enlightenment, and my favorite philosopher of all time, David Hume (Aristotle and Bertrand Russell complete my personal pantheon) was a prominent exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment — not to mention the source of the famous Sagan dictum, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (Hume’s version, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, was “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence”)." - maitani - -

"There are good reasons to admire the Enlightenment as a cultural movement. It was a reaction to (and rejection of) centuries of religious wars in Europe, it featured a call for the use of reason and the popular spreading of knowledge (just think of the famous Encyclopédie curated by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert), and was propelled by some of the foremost intellectual figures of all time (it’s a long list, which includes: Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Newton, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and many others, aside from the above mentioned Hume, Diderot and d’Alembert)." - maitani - -

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BBC News - 'Earliest shrine' uncovered at Buddha's birthplace - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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Every year thousands of Buddhists make a holy pilgrimage to Lumbini - long identified as the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha. Yet despite the many texts chronicling his life and teachings, it is still uncertain when he lived. Estimates for his birth stretch as far back as 623 BC, but many scholars believed 390-340 BC a more realistic timeframe. Until now, the earliest evidence of Buddhist structures at Lumbini dated no earlier than the 3rd Century BC, in the era of the emperor Ashoka. To investigate, archaeologists began excavating at the heart of the temple - alongside meditating monks, nuns and pilgrims. They unearthed a wooden structure with a central void which had no roof. Brick temples built later above the timber were also arranged around this central space. - maitani - -

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The earliest Buddhist shrine: excavating the birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal) <a rel="nofollow" href="http://antiquity.ac.uk/an... ; title="http://antiquity.ac.uk/an... ; - maitani - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: The Distribution of Tin (Cassiterite) - Mediterranean Bronze Age - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2013...

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"The Tin (Cassiterite) Distribution Google Earth 3D GIS Project was originally initiated in 2007 and has finally come to fruition. It is intended to definitively present all currently known instances of the primary ore of Tin throughout the entirety of Europe, the Middle East, and all of North Africa in an attempt to begin to finally put to an end the lingering controversy regarding the availability of Tin to the Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. This mapping includes geological expressions of Tin that range from the largest ancient and modern mines to the smallest, most uneconomical ore sites. While Bronze Age peoples would not have known of the deep sites discovered by modern geophysical techniques or would have wasted their time on the tiniest instances of the ore, they must have been aware of many of the most abundant and accessible sources of Cassiterite from the alluvial deposits in river sediments, etc..." - maitani - -

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Free Technology for Teachers: Create a Library of Google Scholar Search Results - http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2013...

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"As I mentioned last month in my post about creating Google Scholar alerts, Google Scholar is one of the research tools that high school students often overlook. Last week Google added a new Google Scholar option that can help students organize their research. You can now create libraries of articles that you find through Google Scholar. To create a Google Scholar Library sign into your Google account before searching on Scholar.Google.com then just click "save" when you find an article you want save for future reference. Your saved items appear in your Google Scholar Library where you can apply labels to them and sort them." - maitani - -

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Question to native speakers of English: Do you use the word "pupil" as distinct from "student", and if you do, in what sort of context would you use it?

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In schools / HE, 'pupil' is often held to reflect a passive approach; students are more active in their learning. - maitani - -

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I agree with Kirsten. - maitani - -

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Americas' Natives Have European Roots: Scientific American - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article...

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"“At some point in the past, a branch of east Asians and a branch of western Eurasians met each other and had sex a lot,” says paleogeneticist Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, who led the sequencing of the boy’s genome. This mixing, he says, created Native Americans — in the sense of the populations of both North and South America that predated — as we know them. His team's results are published today in Nature." - maitani - -

"The 24,000-year-old remains of a young boy from the Siberian village of Mal’ta have added a new root to the family tree of indigenous Americans. While some of the New World's native ancestry clearly traces back to east Asia, the Mal’ta boy’s genome — the oldest known of any modern human — shows that up to one-third of that ancestry can be traced back to Europe. The results show that people related to western Eurasians had spread further east than anyone had suspected, and lived in Siberia during the coldest parts of the last Ice Age." - maitani - -

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Who's afraid of Marcel Proust? - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture...

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"In autumn 1912, a writer best known for pastiches and society columns took a manuscript to the Nouvelle Revue Française, recently founded by Gaston Gallimard. It was passed to a reader who opened it randomly at page 62 and found what he decided was a boring and overwritten description of a cup of herbal tea. The manuscript was politely declined." - maitani - -

"The novelist was Marcel Proust, the novel was Swann’s Way, the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, and the reader was André Gide. Proust took the book to Grasset, a few streets away in the septième arrondissement, who published it at the author’s expense 100 years ago this week. The following year Proust received one of the best-known apologies in literary history: “Turning down your book,” wrote Gide, “remains one of the greatest regrets of my life.” After some knotty negotiations with Bernard Grasset, Gallimard managed to win Proust back, buying up the last 200 unsold copies of Swann’s Way. Proust won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, and from then the novel became what we now think it to be: a book so famous that we don’t need to have read it to talk about it." - maitani - -

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